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About us

Sanjo Rose

Project Communications, SABAP2

Sanjo is keenly interested in urban ecology, human-wildlife relationships and avian conservation. Her background includes working on urban Black Sparrowhawks in Cape Town, mammal rehabilitation in Vancouver and Cape Parrot research in Hogsback. As a research assistant at the FitzPatrick Institute she is very involved with building and maintaining relationships with citizen scientists and data curating. She hopes to pursue a career in biological conservation within an suburban setting.

Michael Brooks

Information Systems Specialist, SABAP2

Based at the ADU, Michael is responsible for all the IT and software development for SABAP2. Although trained as a nature conservator, my interest in computers and IT lead me to design and develop environmental software applications.

Prof. Peter Ryan

Steering Commitee Chair, South Africa, SABAP2

Peter Ryan graduated from the University of Cape Town, researching the impacts of ingested plastic on seabirds (MSc) and the evolutionary ecology of buntings in the Tristan archipelago (PhD). After a post-doc at the University of California he was appointed academic Coordinator of the Masters Programme in Conservation Biology at the Fitztitute in 1993. Although he mostly works on seabirds and their conservation, he has wide-ranging interests in avian biology, and still maintains an interest in plastic pollution, especially in marine systems. He has served as the President of BirdLife South Africa and is an associate editor of Antarctic Science and Bird Conservation International. He has been an honorary Conservation Officer at Tristan da Cunha since 1989, and is a member of Tristan’s Biodiversity Advisory Group. Peter has spent more than a year on Inaccessible Island, studying the island's endemic buntings as well as conducting surveys of threatened birds and conducting control programmes against alien plants. He is a keen birder and believes in the importance of promoting amateur involvement in ornithology. He has written several books about birds and their identification, and is scientific advisor to African Birdlife, a popular magazine about birds produced by BirdLife South Africa.

Mark Anderson

Steering Commitee member, BirdLife South Africa, SABAP2

Mark Anderson is the CEO of BirdLife South Africa. He worked for two decades as a nature conservation scientist in the Northern Cape and during this time was involved with SABAP1 and the planning of SABAP2. He is a committed conservationist, and regarded as an authority on the biology and conservation of raptors, vultures, and flamingos.

Ernst Retief

Steering Committee member, Birdlife South Africa, SABAP2

Ernst works at BirdLife South Africa and is responsible for implementing data and spatial planning projects as well as the analysis of data for conservation planning. He is also a keen citizen scientist who have participated in various citizen science projects and has also presented numerous SABAP2 workshops.

Dr Robert Thomson

Robert has a broad interest in bird ecology, but is especially interested in between-species interactions. He comes from Pretoria, and grew up birding and ringing in the bushveld areas. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Pretoria, studying mixed species bird flocks for his BSc Hons. These studies led to him being a field assistant in northern Finland. This stint became his MSc thesis at the University of Oulu, which tested the heterospecific attraction hypothesis that migrant songbirds attract to resident songbirds during their habitat selection decisions. He continued with his PhD in Oulu, further investigating the positive associations in Boreal bird communities, but incorporating the interplay of negative, predation and competition, interactions. He defended his thesis in 2006, and moved to southern Finland to take up a post-doc position at the University of Turku investigating various aspects of raptors and their impact on songbird community structure.